Conserved regulatory core and lineage-specific diversification of light-temperature integration in plants.
Catarino B, Rodríguez-Marín F, Úrbez C, Arvanitidou C, Álvarez E
Plant Signaling
The vegetables and wildflowers in your garden time their sprouting and flowering by reading both warmth and light together as a package deal, and knowing how that ancient sensing system evolved could help breeders design crops that stay on schedule as climate change scrambles seasonal cues.
Plants don't just react to sunshine and warmth as two separate things — they combine those signals in a special way that gives them more precise control over when to grow and flower. Researchers traced this combined-signal sensing back to the ancient ancestors of land plants, finding it was largely absent in simpler green algae. They also identified a small set of proteins that act as the core switching machinery for this ability, and these same proteins have been doing the job in everything from mosses to modern flowering plants for hundreds of millions of years.
Key Findings
Streptophyte algae (the lineage that gave rise to land plants) show synergistic developmental and transcriptional responses to combined light and temperature, while chlorophyte algae show only additive responses — pinpointing where this capacity evolved.
Three conserved regulators — phytochrome photoreceptors, PHYTOCHROME INTERACTING FACTOR (PIF), and ELONGATED HYPOCOTYL 5 (HY5) — underpin light-temperature integration across all land plants studied, from bryophytes to flowering plants.
Lineage-specific diversification of downstream gene expression responses is driven by redistribution of where these conserved regulators bind in the genome, not by swapping out the regulators themselves.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists discovered that land plants evolved a sophisticated ability to combine light and temperature signals synergistically — not just additively — to control growth, tracing this capacity to the streptophyte lineage and identifying a conserved set of molecular regulators shared across all land plants.
Abstract Preview
Plants rely on environmental information such as light and temperature to control growth and development. Integrating these cues improves developmental precision, yet it remains unclear how this ca...
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